Piper Hoffman's Links

Plaintiffs suing Costco for sex discrimination face another round
of litigation thanks to the Supreme Court’s recent dismissal
of the Wal-Mart sex discrimination case. Because of the Supreme
Court’s decision, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on
Friday that the Costco trial court m…

Article first published as Judge: Bloomberg Did Not Discriminate
Against Women on Blogcritics. The judge who ruled that Bloomberg LP
did not illegally discriminate against women for taking pregnancy
leave raised an important policy question in her written opinion.
Judge Preska did not drop “an…

Employees often encounter unfair treatment in the workplace that
can be upsetting and even unbearable, but isn’t illegal.
Unless the treatment is based on the employee’s sex, race,
religion, national origin, disability, age, or on another protected
category, a lawyer probably can’t…

What to do with old clothes? The cotton industry has come up with
an innovative answer, one that helps both the environment and
people in need while clearing space in your closet: they will
recycle your unwanted denim into home insulation and donate it to
Habitat for Humanity and others who…

The news this week brings a reminder that while mandatory
arbitration infringes on employees’ rights to a full trial in
court, sometimes a full trial in court is no great shakes either.
Jamie Leigh Jones, the Halliburton employee who accused seven of
her co-workers of brutally raping her, lost…

Lisa Bloom writes in HuffPost Books that “twenty-five percent
of young American women would rather win America’s Next Top
Model than the Nobel Peace Prize.” Just from looking at
people on the street I can see that a troubling number of women and
girls are indeed working hard to make…

It is extraordinarily difficult to protect non-human animals
through the courts. For one thing, there are very few laws that
protect non-human animals, so often there is nothing to ask the
court to enforce. But even when there is a law that should protect
an animal who is in a terrible…

A while back I wrote about the damage that noise, such as the din
in subways, concerts, and spinning classes, does to our hearing.
This article describes evidence that noise is correlated to hearing
loss. Wear those ear plugs. The more people do it, the less silly
we’ll look! Tweet This…

The New York Times published a funny rant from an older childfree
woman. An excerpt: “Iâ€™m amazed that
people would be bold enough to inquire as to why I never had kids,
yet I would never be nervy enough to ask anyone why they had
children. Weâ€™re not an agrarian society…

Dos Equis has agreed to stop running an ad that appeared to advise
men on hunting women (as in hunting with spears). Last month I
wrote about a sexist ad Dos Equis was running that advised men to
â€œ[a]pproach women like you do wild animals, with
caution and a soothing voice.â€…

Today the Supreme Court sounded the
death knell for Dukes v. Wal-Mart, the class action
lawsuit accusing Wal-Mart of paying and promoting women less than
similarly- or less-qualified men. To protect corporations from
having to do more to prevent gender discrimination than pop a few
politically correc/… Read full post »

Today the Supreme Court sounded the death knell for Dukes v.
Wal-Mart, the class action lawsuit accusing Wal-Mart of paying and
promoting women less than similarly- or less-qualified men. To
protect corporations from having to do more to prevent gender
discrimination than pop a few politically correc…

Laura Carroll posted a well-researched argument that parents are
more likely to regret their decision than people who choose not to
have kids. I hope this encourages the nudges out there to stop
telling the childfree that we will regret our decision when
it’s too late — like the doctor wh…

In a new contribution to the debate over the relationship between
happiness and parenting, psychologist Ellen Walker proposes five
explanations for her finding that childfree people are happier than
parents. Here they are in her words: 1. It’s easier for
childfree adults to stay physically heal…

“Approach women like you do wild animals, with caution and
a soothing voice.” I encountered this ad for Dos Equis beer
on the side of a bus stop on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. So
women are nonhumans to be hunted? Good to know: if a man holding a
Dos… Read full post »

Does parenting promote or impede happiness? The latest scuffle
in this debate began with a
Shirley Wang article in The Wall Street Journal about
the distinction between well-being, which roughly means long-t… Read full post »

The makers of Lipton tea were testing it on animals. And I
don’t mean sitting bunnies down with a nice warm mug and a
scone and tracking whether they preferred English Breakfast over
Earl Grey. No, what I mean is:… Read full post »

Why do many parents insist that having children is indispensable
to human fulfillment, when the number of fulfilled childfree adults
proves that it clearly isn’t? I considered this question in
my first post on this blog, “… Read full post »

Â The conversation about choosing not to have
children has moved from isolated listservs into the national
press.Â The national debate has generated some real
support for childfree people and even for their reasons not to have
children, such as the study discussed in The New York
Times Magazine show… Read full post »

The Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear was, of all things,
boring.Â From a Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert rally I
expected something more.Â I really
didnâ€™t know what — what is a rally to
restore sanity anyway?Â What is a rally to keep fear
alive?Â And what in the hell… Read full post »

The CALM Act.Â Sounds sort of Zen, maybe even a
little flaky for Congressional legislation.Â But CALM,
or the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation Act, is a
significant recognition of a health risk few take seriously:
noise-induced hearing loss.

So many women love their high heels. They say the shoes make
them feel sexy, confident, sophisticated, thinner, and more
powerful. They say that high heels make their legs look better,
make their butts look better, and pull their outfits together. They
say that men love the look… Read full post »